There's a 'joke' that goes something like "How do you know if someone is vegan and uses Linux? Don't worry, they will let you know..." with many variations. Thus, I avoid mentioning that I use Linux, to avoid being 'that guy'. If that makes sense? The operating system might be more approachable if there were less people being pretentious about it, in my opinion. (BTW, I use Manjaro.)

I'll also suggest FOSS as alternatives when I hear people complain about proprietary software, if the above does not feel like it would apply.

When I am having problems, I research error messages and warnings, read the man pages and old forum posts that might be related, attempt to diagnose the issue myself and try to do everything I can to avoid bothering the devs. This is more due to anxiety but I think it helps to not waste anyones time but my own. Moreso with user-caused problems as opposed to actual bugs.

Finally, one time someone posted a negative rant about a FOSS application. It referenced comments the sole dev of the program made on github as being toxic. I pored through thousands of comments on the programs github page, literally every comment that it had, to find these supposed toxic comments. Instead I saw a dev being plagued by the most trivial, bullshit problems, often things that had nothing to do with his app whatsoever, with him responding in ways no sane person would think was toxic. So I made sure to call that out on the negative rant, asking them to clarify what led to their criticism. They were unable to do so and instead reverted to name calling, making shit up and using multiple accounts to try to troll me, to no avail. I suspect it was some sort of 'hit piece' attempting to draw away users from the app for reasons beyond me. I don't even use the program it was about.

They may not be code-based contributions but I hope they help, even if only slightly.